this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
669 points (99.1% liked)
Greentext
8547 readers
1009 users here now
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To be fair I was like that when I was 23 a long ass time ago, too...
The only 23 year olds who didn't go through this phase... were the people who had family connections to get them a 100K job after graduation.
rest of us took 6-9 months to find work, often while doing part time stuff to pad or resumes. if you don't have connections getting a job is difficult and takes a lot of work.
we also had degrees from frickin' Harvard. but we had no connections and no idea how the real world worked. I got my first real job 8 months after graduating, after working full time all summer and part time the entire fall. and i was living away from home, off my savings that entire time.
Idk about that. I knew plenty of people who got entry level jobs at Schlumberger or Dell or corporate equivalent, earning $70k+ walking in the door.
If you had top grades and interviewed well, it's possible. But we're talking college grads and maybe one in five or one in ten, depending on your school. It wasn't the "normal" experience. But it wasn't pure nepo shit either.
Spent six months volunteering at a literacy center, which gave me some glowing references and a genuinely good feeling about getting up in the morning in the intermediate time.
Also spent a bunch of time at the gym, which was great once I got back into the dating scene.
First job out of college was a tiny Medical IT company with maybe a dozen employees. Started at $15/hr while they billed me at $80. Spent seven years polishing my resume (should have been out the door at 3, but I was naive and they did up my pay to $35/hr before I'd finally left).
All that is to say, your starting salary isn't forever. Five and ten years of experience counts for a lot.
But staying in the service sector is a dead end. The most dogshit small time IT job is better than carting boxes around, if you want to work in IT. The grungiest nursing job is better than flipping burgers if you want to work in medicine.
Put years on a resume and keep looking for new opportunities. But don't get stuck in the quagmire of retail, unless you actually want to try and climb that career path into management or supply chain or whatever.
And absolutely, stay the fuck out of masters programs. That's for people who have a job lined up, not people looking for work.
Or for people to get at night after they already have a job.